According to ancient custom, spinning is the proper occupation of a housewife, nay more, her very life and being.
From the works of Schuppius (Fabelhans, pp. 837, 838. It is in Wackernagel's Lesebuch, 2. 210), but occurs still earlier in Froschmeuseler, (Magdeb. 1595, A. a. V.). Further information about cognate stories is to be found in the Abhandlung über Thierfabeln bei den Meistergesängen (Berlin, 1855).
158.—Schlauraffenland.
The fable of the apes, or Schlauraffenland (see Glaraff, in Stalder, 1. 451; the cunning, prudent apes are opposed to the stupid ones, apar òsvinnir) unquestionably dates from remote antiquity, for even the present story is taken from an old German poem of the 13th century (Fragmente und kleinere Gedichte, p. xiv. Compare Liedersaal, 2. 385. Altd. Blätter, 1. 163-167. Haupt's Zeitschrift, 2. 560). It is generally told jestingly as here, but in the story of the little sugar-house (No. 15), whose roof was made of cakes, and whose rafters of sticks of cinnamon, it, though still the same, is told with all the believing earnestness of childhood, and links itself to the still deeper myth of the lost paradise of innocence where milk and honey flow. The well-known jest by Hans Sachs is simply in the former manner (see Häsleins Auszug. p. 391); and so is the allusion in Fischart's Gargantua, p. 96a. "I can no longer stay in the country, the air drives me to Schlauraffen, three miles behind Christmas, where the walls are made of gingerbread, the rafters of roast-pork, the wells of malmsey, the rain of milk and cream, the hail of sugar-plums; there you are paid for playing, and rewarded for sleeping; there you see hedges made of sausages, plaster of honey, and roofs of cakes." There is an old French Fabliau of the same kind, Le pays de Cocagne (Méon, 4. 176). In English the land is called Cockney; see Altd. Blätter, 1. 369-401. In the Sicilian patois there is La Cuccagna conquistata, of Basile, Palermo, 1674. The description of the alma città di Cuccagna begins thus,
"Sedi Cuccagna sutta una montagna
di furmaggiu grattatu, et havi in cima
die maccaruni una caudara magna."
Compare Fr. Wilh. Val. Schmidt's Beiträge zur Geschichte der romantischen Poesie, p. 85. In Austria the story goes that people have to creep through an enormously long intestine; he who sticks fast is lost, but he who can work his way through safely and perseveringly will reach a country where he has nothing to do
